Painting depicting French soldiers charging into deadly German rifle fire, August 1914.

Painting depicting French soldiers charging into deadly German rifle fire, August 1914.

Today 109 years ago, on August 7, 1914, the Battle of the Frontiers began, one of the earliest yet bloodiest campaigns of the Western Front.

Following the German declaration of war on France on August 3, both nations prepared to go on the offensive, with the French deploying their Plan XVII and the Germans their Schlieffen Plan.

On August 7, 1914, the French invaded Alsace and Lorraine, the regions they had lost in 1871. The French achieved early success and advanced, but suffered thousands of casualties, and a German push on August 20 at Sarrebourg set them back to their starting points.

On August 21, the French attacked again further north in the Battles of the Ardennes, Charleroi and on August 22 at Rossignol. The French suffered extreme casualties due to advancing en masse across open terrain in broad daylight with minimal artillery support, wearing extremely visible dark blue and red uniforms into German machine-guns and artillery, using outdated 19th century tactics.

The French commanders believed enough "offensive spirit" could overcome any defense. Their attacks were uncoordinated and inflexible, and the French also badly underestimated the strength of the German force in France.

The Germans suffered heavy casualties in their attacks too, also advancing in broad daylight in open fields. Though the Germans did have better tactics and more artillery and machine-guns than the French, which enabled them to succeed and advance.

On August 23, the British engaged the Germans for the first time in the Battle of Mons in Belgium and halted the Germans for some time before being overwhelmed by sheer numbers

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On August 24, the Allies began a general retreat to the Marne river north of Paris, known as the Great Retreat, officially ending the Battle of the Frontiers.

In the Battle of the Frontiers, the French had suffered some 260,000 - 329,000 casualties, of whom 75,000 were killed, 27,000 of those on August 22 alone.

The Germans suffered some 206,000 casualties, but others estimate much higher. The British suffered 1,638 casualties at Mons.

The Battle of the Frontiers and the following First Battle of the Marne marked the end of mobile warfare on the Western Front until August 1918, as trench warfare would soon dominate the battlefields, beginning with the First Battle of the Aisne in September 1914.

Although trench warfare is cruel bloody, the trenches were for the soldiers' protection, and open-field warfare, as in the Battle of the Frontiers, proved to be much bloodier.

As as a result, no months in the First World War would average more casualties than August and September 1914.

But little could anyone know this was only the beginning of a far bigger, longer and bloodier conflict.